[TLO]

Originally Posted by DJ's left nut

But here's what's been interesting - at least to whatever extent you can trust these numbers.

It seems that critical case rates spiked significantly in Italy several days before the mortality rates did. Meanwhile the US critical case rates appears to have held pretty steady.

And man, it's possible I'm standing at a crossing watching down the traintracks as a bus is approaching from my left that I'll simply never see coming. But I've taken the 'overrun our health systems' calls at face value from the start because they're inherently sensible. And IF that's the case, if that's truly the key distinction between benign outcomes and mortality spikes, then that's the key metric to track. May turn out that there's a universal constant and infections will yield the same number of critical cases in all nations - in which case that bus will drill me. But for right now, that's the area I've focused my attention on.

And unfortunately I'm simply consuming too much of this shit to keep track of it at this point, but from what I have seen, our critical care rates have remained awfully reasonable and significantly better than others - at least to this point.

Because every day has been the longest week of my life over the last 8-10 days, everything could be different by Wednesday. But so far there are still some signs out there to be encouraged by.

Again - this will obviously get worse before it gets better. And yes, the numbers will go up (including, eventually, the daily death toll) - but so long as our medical system isn't overrun, we'll come out of this just fine. So in light of that its critical to watch the revs, not just the speedometer.

You should stick around and post more. I like your optimism